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Spambots

August 31, 2007 — Rob Mueller

I keep meaning to post short posts in the technical section of this blog on regular intervals talking about interesting things I’ve come across while running an email service. I also seem to end up being distracted by something else, so I’ve decided I’m going to try and post a Friday summary and see if forcing myself to do it once a week helps.

This week I’ve been dealing a bit with spambots. Currently we have 6 primary incoming MX servers, and 1 secondary MX server. The primary MX record for all our domains (in1.smtp.messagingengine.com) resolves to the 6 IP addresses of these primary servers. Each server runs postfix as the incoming MTA, with a number of patches and external helper programs to determine what are valid delivery addresses, and also to do greylisting, address enumeration detection, etc. On top of this, there’s a separate process that monitors the log file that postfix generates looking for the extra patterns of behavior that give away spamming bots that might not be obvious on one connection, but over time are clear patterns of behavior that legitimate email sending hosts don’t do.

During the week I noticed a new pattern of behavior that seemed to be specific to spam bots only, so I’ve now got the monitoring script detecting that, and adding the detected machines to our “early” block list for 72 hours at a time. The early block list is an internal list of IP addresses and if a host connects to us that is on that list, we immediately return a 554 reject code and disconnect the host. Over the last 2 days the early list has built up to over 600,000 separate IP addresses (up from ~200,000 with the previous pattern detectors), and we’ve noticed a significant reduction in the amount of storm bot spam getting through (you might have noticed the storm bot spam previously as the “greeting card” spam, or the “new online office/club” spam, or the recent “check this video of you on youtube” spam)

Note that this special early block list only helps with email delivered directly to our servers, unfortunately it doesn’t help if you use a forwarding service because the IP address we see is that of the forwarding service, not the connecting spam bot. If you use an @fastmail.fm address or any of our other domains, this protection is automatic. If you have your own domain, we highly recommend you host the email for your domain with us for the best spam protection possible. For more information, see these FAQ entries: